Leadership

Staff

Brian Behlendorf

Executive Director

Behlendorf was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. He has also served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. He was the founding CTO of CollabNet and CTO of the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Behlendorf was a managing director at Mithril Capital Management LLC, a global technology investment firm.

Daniela Barbosa

VP of World Wide Alliances

Daniela Barbosa serves as Vice President of World Wide Alliances for Hyperledger, where she is responsible for the full lifecycle management of Hyperledger’s membership community while overseeing the broader industry and business community outreach and network growth. Daniela has developed and led growth and innovation strategies for more than 18 years with a background working with financial services, media, and enterprise software. Daniela has led both partnerships and alliances teams as well as marketing and has been responsible for driving global partnerships, OEM integrations, market leadership, and global brand awareness.

Tracy Kuhrt

Community Architect

Tracy has had a varied career working in automotive manufacturing, pharmaceutical, microelectronics, and e-commerce industries. Prior to the Linux Foundation, Tracy was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at PayPal on the Strategic Architecture team. Tracy has also developed compilers, assemblers, and linkers for 8- and 16-bit micro-controllers at Microchip Technologies using open source software.

Marta Piekarska

Director of Ecosystem

Marta likes studying: a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Warsaw University of Technology and a double Master from Computer Science and Informatics at Technical University of Berlin and Warsaw University of Technology. Her undergrad Thesis was on Voice Encryption on Android Platform and grad work on GPU-aided Payload Delivery on Linux Kernel. Recently received PhD in User-Informed Design of Privacy Tools, while working for one of the hottest Silicon Valley startups, Blockstream, as their Security Architect. Previously, associated with Deutsche Telekom as the Lead Architect on the Future of Mobile Privacy, a collaboration with Mozilla and Deutsche Telekom improving Firefox OS. As a Post-doc, she also teaches and works at TU Berlin. Her technical interests are covered by what she does – user-informed privacy and security, applications of blockchain beyond cryptocurrency, and lock picking. Outside of work she climbs, reads latin-american novels and enjoys watching Emir Kusturica’s movies. And cooks. A lot.

David Boswell

Director of Ecosystem

David Boswell is a community expert who has worked with Mozilla, Open Networking Foundation, NASA, Sun Microsystems, Nokia and more on their community strategies. Through these past experiences he has expertise with both launching a new community as well as scaling existing communities. He is an O’Reilly author who has co-authored a book about Mozilla development and has also written several articles about community building. He has a Masters degree from Columbia University where he studied how technology can be used for public benefit.

David Huseby

Security Maven

David has spent his 20+ year career driving the adoption of open source software to increase security and reliability in a range of industries. In the 1990’s he helped define and implement the first interactive web applications and was a leader in open source server-side business logic development. He then spent years in the entertainment software industry focusing on performance, reliability and security as well as building teams of engineers focused on security best practices. Most recently, as a senior platform security engineer at Mozilla, he led an effort to harden Firefox Web Browser with the anti-surveillance and security advancements found in the Tor Browser. He brings to the project, years of experience and a great passion for user privacy and improving the security and trust in open source software through transparent and secure software development and deployment best practices.

Arnaud was a staff member of the W3C and the X Consortium and has represented IBM in several standards and open source organizations for many years. Arnaud has been involved in every aspect of the Open Technologies development process. This includes the technical, strategic, political, and legal aspects. Arnaud was editor of several key Web specifications including HTML and DOM and was involved in high profile open source projects such as Xerces, the Apache XML parser, and the X Window System. Arnaud made his first steps in Open Source in 1990 with the release of the XPM library which is still in use today! Arnaud is currently the main representative for IBM at W3C, the chair of the W3C RDF Data Shapes Working Group, and a member of the Hyperledger Project Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

Baohua Yang

Baohua Yang is the principal architect at Oracle Blockchain, leading the development of the Blockchain service and product.

He has been linked into the system architecture, design, and algorithm areas for over 10 years, with leading the design and implementation of enterprise solutions and solving key technical challenges. Besides, he has published 10s papers and served as TPC member in numbers of top-quality international conference and journals.

Since its foundation, he has been contributing into Hyperledger projects (e.g., Fabric and Cello) and Hyperledger community. He is currently serving in Hyperledger project as a member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and co-chair of the Technical Working Group in China (TWGC).

Chris Ferris

TSC Chair

He has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of distributed systems for most of his 36+ year career in IT and has been actively engaged in open standards and open source development since 1999. He has overall technical responsibility for all of IBM’s strategic open technology initiatives, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger Project, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Mesos, Node.js and Docker and more.

Dan Middleton

Dan Middleton is Head of Technology for Intel's Blockchain and Distributed Ledger program.

Dan joined Intel in 2000 to work on emerging web and distributed systems technologies. His early accomplishments include optimizations of matching engines for major stock exchanges and multi-tier system designs at a variety of financial institutions. Working with industry consortia in 2007, Dan led Intel’s contributions on a privacy preserving network leveraging proof of work and anonymous credentials. Since 2009, Dan has incubated new business ventures in Intel’s New Technology Group. Dan is excited to contribute the Sawtooth Lake Distributed Ledger project into Hyperledger and collaborate with the community to create something globally beneficial.

Greg Haskins

Greg Haskins is a Distinguished Engineer for State Street with 20 years of software experience in various industries including telecommunications and financial services.

He specializes in system architecture, operating systems, distributed/parallel/decentralized computing, cryptography, high performance and fault-tolerance. His has founded and/or contributed to many open source projects such as the Linux Kernel, KVM, AlacrityVM, Hyperledger Chaintool, and LSEG MemoryConnect in addition to leading countless proprietary projects, many of which are still in the field today. He holds an MSEE and BSECE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and lives in Holden Massachusetts with his wife and 4 young children.

Hart Montgomery

Hart Montgomery received his B.S.E. from Princeton in 2008 and completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford in 2014, during which he was awarded a Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

He joined Fujitsu Laboratories of America in 2015. His current research interests are spread throughout general cryptography, with a current focus on cryptocurrency and applicable cryptographic techniques, lattice-based cryptography, and cryptographic primitives.

Jonathan Levi

Jonathan Levi is the founder of HACERA. He is a very hands-on computer scientist, applied cryptographer and a mathematician who over the years specialized in building large scale, mission critical systems that had to be highly available, secure and precise/accurate.

Jonathan has an impressive delivery track record. Over the last 4 years Jonathan worked with several blockchain technology stacks. Started with Bitcoin, then worked on an innovative Bitcoin exchange (a start-up, with the mission to add smart contracts on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain before Ethereum was launched), then worked on Ethereum (helped to build the first Ethereum class with Prof. Dan Boneh, at Stanford University).

Jonathan is one of the early contributors to Hyperledger, he was nominated to become the first independent maintainer of Hyperledger Fabric back in July 2016 and was one of the two official release manager of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 in July 2017. Hyperledger is now the world’s first enterprise grade, production ready blockchain stack.

Jonathan brings a unique combination of the technical breadth, depth, experience not just technically, but also an experience that is combined with a deep understanding of the market forces, the various regulatory and business environments, combining a very hands-on background in cryptography and almost a decade of working in the financial sector (Standard & Poor’s, Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs trading desks – working on global quantitative risk management systems).

Kelly Olson

Kelly Olson is the Director of the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) group at Intel.

Intel is working to improve the security, scalability, and privacy of DLT deployments through the use of Intel hardware features such as Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Intel was the initial contributor of the Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain software.

Mic Bowman

Mic Bowman is a principal engineer in Intel Labs and leads the distributed ledger research group.

Mic has spent over 20 years working on large-scale databases and distributed systems. He is currently working on methods for improving the security, scalability, and privacy of distributed ledgers. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.

Nathan George

Nathan George is a Senior Software Engineer and Architect at Evernym and a maintainer for the Hyperledger Indy project.

He holds a degree in Computer Science from Utah State University and a Master of Business Administration from Brigham Young University. Nathan is the chair of Hyperledger Indy’s Agent working group, championing the company’s engagement in the open source community through Hyperledger Indy and is a contributor to distributed identity and blockchain standards at the Decentralized Identity Foundation and the W3C. His development experience spans diverse systems including robotics, GIS, file systems, big data analytics, and attribute-based security systems.

Governing Board

Blythe Masters

Governing Board Chair

Blythe Masters is CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, a company that builds distributed, encrypted straight through processing tools to improve efficiency, security, compliance and settlement speed.

Blythe was previously a senior executive at J.P. Morgan, which she left in 2014 after a career spanning 27 years, following the successful sale of the bank’s physical commodities business which she built. Named J.P. Morgan’s head of Global Commodities in 2007, Blythe was responsible for building an integrated physical and financial commodity business, including market-making, structuring, risk management, financing and warehousing capabilities across the full spectrum of commodity asset classes. From 2012, in addition to Global Commodities, she was responsible for the Corporate &amp; Investment Bank’s Regulatory Affairs overseeing strategies to address the range of complex regulatory changes. She was a member of the J.P. Morgan Corporate &amp; Investment Bank Operating Committee and previously the firm’s Executive Committee. From 2004 to 2007, she was Chief Financial Officer of the Investment Bank. Prior to that role, she was J.P. Morgan’s head of Global Credit Portfolio and Credit Policy and Strategy. Earlier positions at J.P. Morgan include head of North American Structured Credit Products, co-head of Asset Backed Securitization and head of Global Credit Derivatives Marketing. From 2012 to 2014, Blythe was chair of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA). From 2008-2010 she was chair of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). Blythe is the chair of the board of Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Global Fund for Women.

Aaron Symanski

Aaron Symanski is CTO of Change Healthcare, where he leads the company's innovation, and is responsible for IT and application architecture, and new technologies.

Aaron has extensive experience in healthcare and finance, startups, and global enterprises. As a founder of a healthcare analytics startup, Aaron architected and built an innovative peer-to-peer platform that enabled leasing of analytics by authors, data by owners, and executing analytics, all while preserving each party’s intellectual property.

Prior to that, as a Managing Director at Bank of America, Aaron architected, built, and ran the Rates Derivatives and Credit Derivatives global trading platforms, including back office and middle office functionality. He also architected a new enterprise Capital Management platform.

Earlier, Aaron architected the Cash Pro platform at ABN Amro. This included the Cash Pro Mobile and Cash Pro Web products, where he introduced leading-edge capabilities.

Previously Aaron was the founder of an equipment leasing technology provider, and one of the first hosting businesses to provide dynamic web pages. His first role was at Andersen, where he led the architecture for the International Tax Forecasting product, targeted at the world’s top 50 companies.

Aaron has an MBA, MSCS, and Bachelors (Econ) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Carlos Kuchkovsky

Carlos Kuchkovsky is the Chief Technology & Fintech Data Officer of New Digital Business at BBVA.

He has experience leading global teams, using the latest technologies to create new products, solutions and systems. Prior to New Digital Business, he worked on BBVA’s Open Platform, Banks as a Service, Financial Digital Platforms, and Added Valued Mobile Services initiatives. Prior to BBVA, he worked as a consultant in mobile technologies for financial institutions and retail and developed multiplayer mobile games. Carlos is co-author of the book “Blockchain Industrial Evolution,” mentor of AI at Universidad Internacional La Rioja, has lectured at the International Desing Scholl.

Charles Cai

Charles Cai, Senior Advisor to the President Wanda Financial Group and acting Chief Architect, is responsible for building Center of Excellences for disruptive products and services around Big Data, Cloud and BlockChain.

Charles has more than two decades of experience and track records of global transformational programs – from vision, evangelism to end-to-end execution in global investment banks, and energy trading companies, where he excels at designing and building innovative, large scale, Big Data systems in high volume low latency trading, global ETRM(Energy Trading &amp; Risk Management), and advanced temporal and geospatial predictive analytics, as Chief Front Office Technical Architect and Head of Data Science. Charles is also a frequent keynote speaker at various international conferences to share knowledge in Big Data, IoT, Cyber Security, FinTech and BlockChain etc. He’s also won awards at numerous hackathons to show case open innovations. He’s a core organizer of various big data hackathons for public sectors involving hundreds of data scientists and a wider EMEA community. His evangelism community work, pioneering Big Data initiatives in Finance, Oil and Gas industries since early days, eventually has earned him one of the 50 UK’s Top Data Leaders and Influencers (http://dataleadership.co.uk/data-50-awards/). Charles graduated with an Electronic Engineering Degree from Fudan University, Shanghai.

Chris Ferris

TSC Chair

Christopher Ferris is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO Open Technology in the IBM Cloud organization.

He has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of distributed systems for most of his 36+ year career in IT and has been actively engaged in open standards and open source development since 1999. He has overall technical responsibility for all of IBM’s strategic open technology initiatives, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger Project, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Mesos, Node.js and Docker and more.

Craig Young

Craig Young, Chief Technology Officer for SWIFT, is responsible for developing the company’s long term technology vision and strategy.

Young has more than 20 years of industry experience including executive leadership of large scale, complex, global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President and CIO of Network Systems for Verizon Corporation where he was responsible for all supporting systems and technical strategy for its residential, enterprise and wholesale network provisioning, inventory, surveillance, construction and engineering globally. He also served as VP of Consumer Commerce for Verizon Wireless where he spearheaded the company’s omni-channel strategy. His responsibilities included all development and ongoing evolution of their self-service and sales systems capabilities across their 2000+ Retail stores, Indirect Agents, Telesales centers, National Retail partners, Customer Care, M2M devices and their customer’s handsets. Additionally, Craig supported all national Supply Chain application development, Fraud detection systems and Commissions systems. Craig was also responsible for building and implementing strategic relationships and systems that support their cable partnerships, Precision Marketing team and Softpay payment platform. He has received both company and industry recognition for his innovative approach to applying technology including Computerworld’s “Top 40 under 40,” CIO Magazine’s “Ones to Watch,” and most recently was recognized by Computerworld magazine as one of its “Premier 100” IT professionals.

Daichi Iwata

Daichi Iwata is Head of FinTech Business Development Office of NEC Corporations.

Daichi Iwata is leading a Blockchain project of NEC corporations through collaborations with many institutions and NEC Research Lab Europe, which has been leading academic Blockchain security research. He explores broader business models and public services of Blockchain beyond FinTech space.

Dan Middleton

Dan Middleton is Head of Technology for Intel's Blockchain and Distributed Ledger program.

Dan joined Intel in 2000 to work on emerging web and distributed systems technologies. His early accomplishments include optimizations of matching engines for major stock exchanges and multi-tier system designs at a variety of financial institutions. Working with industry consortia in 2007, Dan led Intel’s contributions on a privacy preserving network leveraging proof of work and anonymous credentials. Since 2009, Dan has incubated new business ventures in Intel’s New Technology Group. Dan is excited to contribute the Sawtooth Lake Distributed Ledger project into Hyperledger and collaborate with the community to create something globally beneficial.

Dave Treat

Dave Treat is the global co-lead of Accenture’s blockchain practice and serves as a client account lead for several leading financial services institutions.

He has over 18 years of experience in Financial Services split between consulting and industry roles. The early part of his career was primarily focused on retail banking, and cards and in the past decade he has focused on capital markets. Dave has experience and expertise in running strategy functions, innovation, strategic cost management, large-scale restructuring, customer relationship management, M&amp;A, outsourcing &amp; offshoring and process excellence.

Gert Sylvest

Gert Sylvest is co-founder and VP of Global Network Strategy of Tradeshift, a cloud based company with the goal of connecting all companies in the world.

Gert is co-founder and VP of Global Network Strategy of Tradeshift, a cloud based company with the goal of connecting all companies in the world. He holds a MS in Computer Science and Music, specializing in real-time distributed collaboration systems. Has spent the past 1.5 years growing product- and engineering teams in Tradeshift’s Chinese joint ventures and enabling cross-regional cloud infrastructure. For the past 15 years he has been designing open, high volume business systems and networks with Tradeshift, Accenture and Avanade. He was responsible for the technical design and implementation of the Danish (Nemhandel) and European (PEPPOL) peer-to-peer-based invoicing infrastructures.

Hiroki Suzuki

Hiroki Suzuki is Senior Director of Middleware Business Unit at Fujitsu Limited, responsible for digital business solutions including blockchain initiative.

He has 30 years of experience in software product strategy and cloud services. His recent activities were providing Fujitsu’s public cloud platform in 6 regions worldwide, led some startup companies acquisition and partner alliances. He is also leading some digital transformation projects at Fujitsu customers as well as Fujitsu internally by leveraging API management. Blockchain initiative is a part of his API ecosystem development.

Jerry Cuomo

Jerry Cuomo is an IBM Fellow and newly appointed Vice President of Blockchain Technologies.

Jerry is leading the creation of an emerging business unit to define IBM’s Blockchain strategy, offerings, and customer engagement approach. In 2016 IBM Blockchain is open for business, with the creation and open source contributions to the new Linux Hyperloedger Project, the introduction of IBM Blockchain Cloud Services, and the new Blockchain Garages to be opened in NYC, London, Japan, and Singapore. Jerry is known as one of the fathers of the IBM Websphere software brand, where he served as Chief Technology Officer for 15 years. During this time, Jerry led efforts to establish key middleware initiatives including IBM’s API Management, Mobile and Cloud Services offerings in Bluemix. Jerry also led acquisitions to accelerate delivery in emerging middleware areas including StrongLoop, Worklight, and DataPower. Jerry continues to be a visible spokesperson for IBM in the emerging technology areas including Blockchain, API Economy, Digital Transformation, Cloud Services, and the lean start-up approach to continually address new business opportunities.

Jonas von Malottki

Jonas von Malottki is Head of Department for Finance and Controlling IT Solutions within the Daimler IT Group Functions.

Jonas holds a Diploma in Computer Science and Japanese Studies from University of Bonn. Within Daimler he previously was in lead architecture roles for Finance Systems and various leadership positions. He has a keen interest in new technologies and the Open Source movement.

Kevin Rothman

His team is responsible for all technology legal support needs of the company, including with respect to software, cybersecurity, open source, innovation, outsourcing, procurement and telecommunications matters. His team is also responsible for supporting the company’s websites, mobile apps and social media presences. Kevin sits on the Chief Information Officer’s leadership team, and is also a member of the Digital Leadership Committee of the General Counsel’s Organization. In his role, Kevin supports a variety of strategic initiatives across the company.

Kevin joined American Express in February 2007 as Counsel in the Technology Law Group. He was named to his current position of Chief Technology Counsel in December 2010.

Prior to joining American Express, Kevin practiced law in the Intellectual Property Transactions Group at Kirkland & Ellis in New York. Before that he practiced in the Technology Transactions Group at Cooley Godward in Silicon Valley, where he helped to launch the original Creative Commons licenses. He earned his BA at Yale University and his JD at Columbia University.

Ram Jagadeesan

Ram Jagadeesan is a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Blockchain in Cisco's Chief Strategy office. He has developed Internet scale distributed systems for VolP, video, mobile and wireless networking and IoT.

Ram Jagadeesan is a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Blockchain in Cisco’s Chief Strategy office. He has developed Internet scale distributed systems for VolP, video, mobile and wireless networking and IoT. Jagadeesan incubates disruptive technologies to shape CIsco’s strategy. A highly-regarded contributor to open standards and open source implementation, Jagadeesan was a founder and board member of Open Interconnect Consortium where he drove IoT interoperability. He has been a chair of the Hyperledger Architecture Working group since its inception, where he is a proponent of modern architecture for blockchain. Jagadeesan has been granted over 50 patents. He holds a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara and a Bachelors of Science in Electronics and Communications Engineering from College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University in India.

Robert Palatnick

Robert Palatnick is Managing Director and the Chief Technology Architect, with global responsibility for IT strategy, architecture, standards and engineering design of the platforms, systems and applications underlying DTCC’s broad range of products and services.

Palatnick previously served as a Domain Lead in the Application Development division of IT and was Chief Administrative Officer of Information Technology from 2003 to 2007. Palatnick joined Government Securities Clearing Corporation (GSCC), a DTCC subsidiary, in 1993 as Vice President, Information Technology. He became Managing Director and Chief Information Officer of DTCC subsidiaries GSCC (1996), Mortgage-Backed Securities Clearing Corporation (2000) and Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (2003). Prior to that, Palatnick was Vice President, Development and Systems, at Security Pacific Corporation Sequor Software Services. Palatnick received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Buffalo, and is an alumnus of the David Rockefeller fellowship.

Thierry Chevalier

Thierry Chevalier is currently Architect in Airbus Research & Technology Program Chief Engineering team.

Torsten Zube

Before getting deeply engaged with Blockchain, Torsten drove as Chief Product Strategist the overall product & innovation strategy. In the early part of his career he had various positons in software development including Area Product Owner, Development Project Manager, Software Architect, and Application Developer.

Toshiya Cho

He has a career as systems engineer, business consultant for financial industry as well as a banker. Before joining Hitachi, Toshiya was responsible for Internet Banking and CRM at Citibank N.A.(Japan) and has been involved in a wide range of business and technologies related to marketing, channel strategies, biometrics, and artificial intelligence. Toshiya is a frequent speaker at industrial events and academia. He co-authored “E-Commerce Banking Strategies” (2000), Toyo Keizai, Inc. Toshiya holds a BA in economics from Waseda University and MBA in marketing and international business from New York University.

Umar Farooq

He is responsible for financial oversight and business management across Technology, Operations, KYC and Controls. He also manages the Blockchain initiative for the Corporate and Investment Bank. Prior to this position, Umar was the Head of Small Business Segment for Chase Consumer Bank. His key responsibilities included P&amp;L management, service delivery, marketing and AML/KYC controls. Previously he held the positions of National Sales Manager and CFO for Chase Business Banking. Umar joined JP Morgan Chase in 2009. Prior to joining JP Morgan Chase, he was the Chief Sales Officer for CIT where he led revenue growth across middle market and specialty lending businesses. He started his career at McKinsey &amp; Company. Umar got his B.S. in Computer Science, B.S. in Economics and M.Engg. in Computer Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Umar received his JD from Yale Law School. He is a member of the New York Bar.

Xuyang Zhang

Xuyang Zhang joined Baidu in June 2016 as Vice President, in charge of wealth management and asset management under the Baidu Finance services Group.

Xuyang zhang joined Baidu in June 2016 as Vice President, in charge of wealth management and asset management under the Baidu Finance services Group. Before joining Baidu, Mr.Zhang served as the general manager of China Everbright Bank’s Asset Management Department. During his 19 years in China Everbright Bank, he held numerous key roles in investing banking, wealth management, retail banking and oversaw the launch of Chinese commercial banking’s first RMB wealth management products.